“The Red Sea of War”

This chapter examines how Americans read the Bible in response to the battle at Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War. In the North, Henry Ward Beecher set the tone in his sermon, “The Battle Set in Array,” which called on the Exodus story to rouse northerners to war. As Beecher preached it, the Exodus was a war story, a story of God’s deliverance of his people in battle, but it was also a story that warned people that they could not just rely on God – they would have to join the fight. Many northerners shared Beecher’s zeal, including Catholics, some of whom saw wartime service as a way to earn the respect of others in a predominately anti-Catholic nation. Overall northerners embraced the war, viewing it as a noble enterprise that would improve the moral resolve of a nation that had become materialistic, immoral, and weak.

The American Civil War

Because of its position as a port in the cotton trade, Liverpool had a special role in the Civil War. This chapter considers the rival consular activities of North and South, and the secret local commissioning of battle-ships as well as the campaign by both sides to enlist British support. Henry Ward Beecher was one of the key figures in these activities.

“We’re Marching to Zion” Isaac Watts in America

In 1872 Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent American preacher of the time, claimed that hymns, particularly those of Isaac Watts, shaped Americans’ theology in a uniquely powerful way. Hymns even apart from music—read aloud, memorized, and contemplated—found a special place in the inner lives of nineteenth-century Americans closely akin to that of Scripture itself. The roots of “religious emotions” in hymnody—especially for those generations of Americans who had learned hymns from childhood—were linked to a range of theological concepts. Crookshank examines how the poetry and music associated with the towering figure of Isaac Watts has been invoked and supported in a variety of religious settings for more than two hundred years.

An Iconic Image: Henry Ward Beecher in Puck Magazine

Henry Ward Beecher, the influential pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn until his death in 1887, became an iconic figure in Puck magazine during its first decade. Beecher, who was involved in the Tilton marital scandal, was satirized in word and graphics by editor and cartoonist Joseph Keppler for both his womanizing and his politics. A study of Puck’s response to Beecher from 1877 to 1887 exemplifies the magazine’s crusade against dishonesty and attempt to safeguard public morals as it followed in the steps of its mascot Puck, proclaiming “What Fools These Mortals Be!”

The Jubilee Singers of Fisk University

This chapter recounts the history of the founding of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1866 by the American Missionary Association and a trio of its agents: Erastus Milo (E. M.) Cravath, Edward Parmelee Smith, and John Ogden. The school’s educational philosophy emphasized teacher training, theology, training for craft work, and liberal arts. George L. White, hired as treasurer, initiated an informal music program that grew into an avenue for generating profit and promoting Fisk’s educational agenda, thanks to a choir he put together with the assistance of Ella Sheppard, who as music teacher was the first and only black staff member at Fisk from 1870 to 1875. In public, the Fisk choristers sang music from the white popular tradition, known as “people’s song” in the words of composer George Frederick Root. In private they introduced their spirituals to the white teachers, doing so under some duress, as they associated the songs with an enslaved past to be forgotten. Around early 1871 George White began urging the American Missionary Association to let him take his choristers on the road to raise money for the school; the group would be modeled on “singing families” such as the Hutchinson Family Singers. After much debate his plan was approved, and after a few weeks on the road White named his choir the Jubilee Singers. Although initially a dismal failure, the troupe’s rebranding, decision to sing more spirituals and less people’s song, and the patronage of Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn led to a reversal of fortune. By early 1872 the Jubilee Singers were on their way to fame and fortune. They presented their concerts as a “service of song,” to remind the public that their singing was not entertainment but rather had a religious and moral mission.

Theology

This chapter examines the pulpit of Protestant Dissent in nineteenth-century Britain and North America. It focuses on a specific rhetorical genre: the lectures that seasoned ministers gave to young men just starting their careers. Texts considered include Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s Lectures to My Students; the Yale Lectures on Preaching by Henry Ward Beecher, R.W. Dale, and other prominent figures; and several discourses delivered before the Theological Union of Victoria University, in Toronto, Canada. Topics addressed in the chapter include the importance of pastoral visitation and prayer; suggestions for overseeing music, Scripture readings, and all other aspects of the worship service; the goals and purposes of preaching; and strategies and techniques for preparing and delivering sermons. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues for further study. Promising topics might include comparing these lectures to other nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses and examining sermon texts written not only by the lecturers themselves, but also by women, people of colour, and others not represented in this study.

The Bible and Scriptural Interpretation

Evangelicalism was the chief factor moulding the theology of most Protestant Dissenting traditions of the nineteenth century, dictating an emphasis on conversions, the cross, the Bible as the supreme source of teaching, and activism which spread the gospel while also relieving the needy. The chapter concentrates on debates about conversion and the cross. It begins by emphasizing that the Enlightenment and above all its principle of rational inquiry was enduringly important to Dissenters. The Enlightenment led some in the Reformed tradition such as Joseph Priestley to question not only creeds but also doctrines central to Christianity, such as the Trinity, while others, such as the Sandemanians, Scotch Baptists, Alexander Campbell’s Restorationists, or the Universalists, privileged the rational exegesis of Scripture over more emotive understandings of faith. In the Calvinist mainstream, though, the Enlightenment created ‘moderate Calvinism’. Beginning with Jonathan Edwards, it emphasized the moral responsibility of the sinner for rejecting the redemption that God had made available and reconciled predestination with the enlightened principle of liberty. As developed by Edwards’s successors, the New England theology became the norm in America and was widely disseminated among British Congregationalists and Baptists. It entailed a judicial or governmental conception of the atonement, in which a just Father was forced to exact the Son’s death for human sinfulness. The argument that this just sacrifice was sufficient to save all broke with the doctrine of the limited atonement and so pushed some higher Calvinists among the Baptists into schism, while, among Presbyterians, Princeton Seminary retained loyal to the doctrine of penal substitution. New England theology was not just resisted but also developed, with ‘New Haven’ theologians such as Nathaniel William Taylor stressing the human component of conversion. If Calvinism became residual in such hands, then Methodists and General and Freewill Baptists had never accepted it. Nonetheless they too gave enlightened accounts of salvation. The chapter dwells on key features of the Enlightenment legacy: a pragmatic attitude to denominational distinctions; an enduring emphasis on the evidences of the Christian faith; sympathy with science, which survived the advent of Darwin; and an optimistic postmillennialism in which material prosperity became the hallmark of the unfolding millennium. Initially challenges to this loose consensus came from premillennial teachers such as Edward Irving or John Nelson Darby, but the most sustained and deep-seated were posed by Romanticism. Romantic theologians such as James Martineau, Horace Bushnell, and Henry Ward Beecher rejected necessarian understandings of the universe and identified faith with interiority. They emphasized the love rather than the justice of God, with some such as the Baptist Samuel Cox embracing universalism. Late nineteenth-century Dissenters followed Anglicans in prioritizing the incarnation over the atonement and experiential over evidential apologetics. One final innovation was the adoption of Albrecht Ritschl’s claim that Jesus had come to found the kingdom of God, which boosted environmental social activism. The shift from Enlightenment to romanticism, which provoked considerable controversy, illustrated how the gospel and culture had been in creative interaction.